Background noise is an innate problem in wireless telephone communication systems. In a noisy environment, for example at the airport, on the street, in the car etc., an effective communication over the wireless telephone systems using hands-free is no easy task. To suppress the background noises, conventional wireless telephone systems include an array of microphone that receives a near-end user's voice and background noise and outputs corresponding audio signal outputs for subsequent encoding and transmission to the telephone of a far-end user.
However, these existing techniques require two microphones and additional signal processing capabilities to generate a signal which does not include background noise. While using these techniques in a wireless headset (for e.g. Bluetooth headset), the additional signal processing capabilities have to be provided inside the Bluetooth headset. The additional signal processing capabilities include various algorithms which attempt to differentiate between a voice component of the audio signal and a background noise component of the audio signal, and then attenuate the level of the background noise component.
To run these algorithms in the Bluetooth headset, additional signal processing capabilities are required. In the case of headsets, the signal processors are not powerful enough to process the signals to suppress background noise. Providing this additional functionality in the Bluetooth headset becomes an overload in implementation as well as power consumption reasons. Also, this is not a cost effective solution.
What is needed then, is a wireless telephone that suppresses the effect of background noise present in an input audio signal without additional signal processing capabilities and algorithms. The present invention has been developed to meet these needs in the art.